Over the past year, MuckRock has been filing nationwide requests for the hard materials that connect the powers­ that ­be to their parasites.

It’s as much about what we can know as what we can’t know. And it requires putting money behind requests and feet on the ground.

That’s why MuckRock took the opportunity to launch its first project page with the Private Prison Project – a place to gather, contextualize, and follow the requests and stories that will help provide the data and dirt to have a real conversation.

Private Prisons in America Are Turning 25 Years Old

Winn Correctional Center opened its doors 25 years ago as the first privately­ run medium security prison in America.

And, soon, its life cycle as one of the country’s oldest for­profit facilities will come to an end, when
the handoff from Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections is completed.

Kissimmee, FL, August 25, 2004 — An Osceola County inmate transfers vegetables he cooked for the Red Cross into a serving container. The Red Cross is providing free meals to residents affected by Hurricane Charley. FEMA Photo/Mark Wolfe

For the first time in the facility’s history, a new ability to scrutinize its inner workings will exist.

Until then, Winn Correctional, just like all privately­ run prisons, will maintain its legal right to secrecy.

Private prisons in America hold 150,000 of America’s incarcerated population. They were born of Reagan­ era privatization policies and lauded as a quick, cost­ effective way to build and staff facilities. They only operate in some states but are popular with agencies of the federal government.

REITs pay no taxes, passing the responsibility for that to investors, and using them for prisons turns our incarceration system into a glorified hotel chain whose locations are all like the proverbial Hotel California for their guests.

These prisons are private businesses, they’re run as such, and that affords them certain privileges–like keeping their books closed.

The privacy protections accorded to businesses who deal with government to withhold “trade secrets” serve a reasonable purpose often, but there’s a compelling case to be made that when the commodity is human bodies – some exception should be made.

Before Winn, private operators dabbled in minimum­ security and juvenile offenders, but the idea expanded to encompass higher security and local jail inmates.

That a profit is made is but a happy side­ effect of its true benefit: government cost­ savings.

Private prisons make money and they save money.

So they say.

If Private Prisons In Fact Save Money, How Do They Do It?

Back in early 2001, the Department of Justice issued a report, “Emerging Issues on Privatized Prisons,” based on its study of prison privatization.

“[I]t was discovered that, rather than the projected 20% savings, the average saving from privatization was only about 1 percent,” the report says, “and most of that was achieved through lower labor costs.”

Nonetheless, in the foreigner ­fueled atmos-­fear of this post–9/11 world, the government decided it needed help housing all its new captures.

Private prison corporations got their own proverbial “shots ­in ­the ­arm” and they lined up to take them.

With no need to maneuver the hoops of the government procurement process or dole out federal benefits, because the government has contracted out its responsibilities to the great profit of private operators.

But it remains difficult to ascertain just what lessons the government should be learning from the entities they’ve trusted to do their job better than it can; the extent to which profits are being made from extras– inmate fees, communications commissions, inmate labor, etc–also remains in the dark.

If a public prison added these expenses might they be considered taxes?

Private Prisons Have Perverse Incentives To Lock Up “Good Prisoners” Longer, Send “Bad Prisoners” To Public Facilities or Freedom

We do know that millions of dollars have been poured into elections and lobbying to in order to make private operators an integral part of many state Departments of Correction and the immigrant detention machine.

It’s difficult to quantify the effect that private interest can have on the systems for the public good, like criminal justice.

Let’s look at Louisiana; where Winn shares the honor of being one of just two major state private prisons.

Dozens of locally ­incentivized lock­-ups have created so many mini-­economies and a monstrous prison population – Louisiana has the highest per capita of any state in the country with the highest per capita prison population in the world – America, land of the free.

Which is why an eyebrow might be raised at the fact that a place like Correction Corp’s Winn Correctional averages about one grievance per prisoner a year.

The majority of those, about 60 percent, are regarding issues of time computation, according to a Louisiana representative — implying it would be worse if they involved assaults or medical care.

But concerns about time computation become more curious when there’s an incentive to keeping low maintenance prisoners for as long as possible.

In Florida, the DOC head caught flak for and then backtracked from a remark validating concerns that private operators “cherry pick” the least costly offenders; unfortunately, attempts to substantiate the frequency of transfers in and out of prisons have been met with confusing explanations about out­-dated contract clauses and inaccessible data.

Private Prisons Want Privacy With Public Records on their Public Money Contracts

In fact, across the South, lawyers with GEO Group, in particular, have become actively involved with the handling of public records requests.

It’s an atypical occurrence in the public records process to be redirected when asking agencies for records related to their contractors, but in this case the agency employers simply don’t maintain or have access to them.

Here’s a prime example of the private prison, public records run around in Louisiana:

Back to Florida, a state with strong public records laws, here is another great example of public officials shirking their public duties because a private contractor has been hired with public money to serve the public purpose of imprisoning people for the criminal justice system:

In Florida, the GEO corporation reserves the right to charge for responding to records requests too. So the public pays GEO Group once to do the job (which includes generating and maintaining public records for inspection) and then the company turns public records into another profit center at the individual taxpayer’s expense.

In Texas, GEO has provided pages of arguments for why per diem rates and staffing plans should be withheld from the public.

At the Alexandria Transfer Center, an inadvertent follow ­up resulted in a frustrated response from the agency’s lawyer, who wanted to make it clear that GEO, not he, handles these matters.

However, GEO’s lawyer generously provided the agreement by which LaSalle Economic Development District’s receives a handsome fee each month to handle administrative issues related to the contract.

There’s no clear indication of what that covers, but, presumably, dealing with the public was not a stipulation.

The fee is something of a reward for LEDD, which actually acts as the middleman between the Feds and the corporation, a not uncommon way to fast track a new project and a solid way to gain the support in which it operates.

With financial influence in most of their heavily ­populated states, private prisons have either been or had the ears of legislators, lawyers, and law enforcement for years, even as public opinion has questioned its benefits and the data (or lack thereof) that’s used to support them.

So, in “Everything’s ­For ­Sale” America, corporations are entitled to their privacy in a way that individuals only imagine anymore – even if those individuals are actively being detained in that world.

In the wake of transitions like Winn’s, it will be important to consider the human cost of their “trade secrets.”

Unfortunately, doing so has a dollar bill cost, too.

That is why we took the time at MuckRock to launch the Private Prison Project and hope that you’ll join us there to bring accountability and transparency to these private institutions built to profit on public dollars.

In 2013, I took over lead direct action organizing of the Peaceful Streets Project and went on to launch our most successful...

Joshua PinedaSeptember 6, 2015

PhotographyisNotaCrime.com was founded as a one man blog in 2007 by Carlos Miller and grew into a full news website in 2014. We are listed in GoogleNews.com under the name PINAC News, and have over 100 contributors behind the scenes.